Brewers second baseman Rickie Weeks led all National League players at his position with 74 hits and 47 runs scored, entering play Tuesday. He also was tied for first in home runs for NL second basemen with Arizona's Kelly Johnson with 12.

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Chicago - The Milwaukee Brewers almost had forgotten what it felt like to lose two straight games, much less two like this.

It still hurts.

For the second consecutive night, the sterling work of the Brewers' starting pitcher was all for naught as the bullpen let it get away. The result this time was a 5-4, 10-inning loss to the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field in a game they trailed by three runs in the eighth inning.

"It's tough," said Yovani Gallardo, who watched an apparent victory vanish after seven brilliant innings (three hits, one run, 10 strikeouts). "The bullpen has been doing a great job for us all year.

"It's just one of those things. It didn't work out today."

The Brewers had gone 35 games without losing two straight, dating to a seven-game skid in late April/early May that began in Houston, then continued in Atlanta and St. Louis. Reliever Kameron Loe surrendered the only run in a 1-0 loss in the eighth inning Monday night, but Marco Estrada was much worse in this one.

In a span of three batters with one down in the eighth, Estrada turned a 4-1 lead into a 4-4 tie. Doubles by Kosuke Fukudome and Starlin Castro delivered one run, and Aramis Ramirez knotted it with a laser-beam home run into the left-field bleachers.

So effective earlier in the season, Estrada has been increasingly erratic, and manager Ron Roenicke wasn't sure why.

"I don't know what's going on with him," said Roenicke, who didn't have Loe available in the eighth after using him in three consecutive games. "He had a good outing last time (against New York).

"His stuff still looks fine. He's down in the (strike) zone. But for some reason they're hitting him."

Roenicke conceded he might have to switch to LaTroy Hawkins, who lowered his earned run average to 0.55 with a perfect ninth inning, with games on the line when Loe is unavailable. The Cubs won the game against side-armer Tim Dillard, who saw his string of six scoreless outings snapped.

Tony Campana led off the Cubs 10th with a double down the left-field line and was bunted to third by Fukudome. Roenicke used a ploy in that situation he has resorted to in the past - the five-man infield - but Castro lined Dillard's first pitch over rightfielder Corey Hart for the game-winning hit.

Though the bullpen was on the hook for the loss, Roenicke rightly pointed to his team's inability to put the game away early when presented with numerous chances. Following a pattern that haunted them on the road earlier in the season, the Brewers collected only two hits in 16 at-bats (.125) with runners in scoring position.

"We had lots of chances to bust the game open," said Roenicke. "We had runners on base the whole game. It came down to the bullpen but we should have busted that game open early."

The Brewers could have scored several runs off Cubs starter Randy Wells in the early innings. After Rickie Weeks led off the third with a single, Nyjer Morgan bunted for a hit and both runners advanced when Wells' flip to first base was errant.

Ryan Braun lined a single to left to score Weeks and Prince Fielder drew a walk to load the bases with none down. Casey McGehee, who has gotten few breaks during his prolonged slump, hit a sharp grounder up the middle that Castro speared with a diving effort to get the force at second as Morgan scored.

Hart drew another walk to reload the bases, but Yuniesky Betancourt popped out and Jonathan Lucroy lined out to left, leaving the Brewers with a 2-0 lead.

Gallardo led off the fourth with a walk and barely beat the throw to second when Fukudome failed to make a shoestring catch of Morgan's sinking liner to right with one down. Braun hit a grounder to second baseman Jeff Baker, but Castro fanned on his flip to second for an error that loaded the bases.

Fielder lined a sacrifice fly to left, but that was all for the Brewers when McGehee grounded out to short.

In the meantime, Gallardo was encountering little difficulty. He pitched around a leadoff double in the second by Reed Johnson, the only Cubs hitter to advance past first base over the first six frames.

The Brewers failed to cash in on a two-on, no-out situation in the seventh off reliever Rodrigo Lopez and the Cubs finally chipped a run off the lead in the bottom of the inning on a one-out homer to left by Geovany Soto.

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